While preparing yesterday's Nugget about blacked-out websites and that it would affect SEO, we were reminiscing about all the things we've seen that caused websites to break and how each was harmed.

Starting with this Nugget, and continuing for 2 more days, we are going to explain the 3 common problems that can harm your jewelry website. Each is damaging in some way or another and will harm your ranking in Google's search results.

1. Forgetting to renew your domain name.

This is a biggy, and it might be the biggest issue that small jewelry store deal with. Since most jewelry stores do not have an in-house IT guy, it's easy to overlook the importance of renewing your domain name yearly. Your bookkeeper probably doesn't get a paper bill and you might think the email renewal is spam.

The tell-tale sign that you've forgotten to renew your domain name is when see a generic GoDaddy, Network Solutions, Enom, Register.com, or some other placeholder page instead of your jewelry website. These are really deadly for your business because Google will assume you've gone out of business.

If you don't visit your website often, you might not realize you have a problem. Another hint that something is wrong should be when you stop getting emails, when your phone rings less often, and of course if a customer says "I couldn't find your website."

To recover from this issue you must contact your website guy right away and pay for the renewal. Once it's paid, you need to make sure someone is in charge of the regular renewal.

Renewal prices for domain names are very low. You might be tempted to pay for a 5 year renewal just so you don't have to worry about it for a while. Network Solutions claims that longer term renewals will help your SEO, but Google has debunked that myth.

If you do decide to renew for 5 years, you need to make sure the email on file with your domain is one that you will still check in 5 years. Otherwise you will have the same problem all over again.

It could take weeks, or even a month to recover your lost ranking and website visitors

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